Dr Paul Long, senior lecturer in pharmacognosy at King's College London, who is one of the authors, said: 'We were surprised at the lack of evidence to support the current oral penicillins dosing recommendations for children, as it is such a commonly used drug.

"We use the massive computing power available to us to find only the good fragments and link them together," said Chenglong Li, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at Ohio State and senior author of a study detailing this work.